Perhaps the maintainer should burn out, and let someone take over the gem who'll commit to feature-completeness.
Full disclosure: I'd consider "the maintainer" -- a gentleman named Steve -- an Internet buddy of mine. He is a real person, just like you. When he's not doing excessive amounts of free work for for-profit corporations, he enjoys philosophy and Netrunner. (Edit: Steve has contributed code and a lot of non-code scutwork to dozens of projects in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem, including -- off the top of my head -- Rails, half of why's body of work, Shoes (a pedagogy project), and, oh yeah, the emoji gem.)
You appear to have the notion that Steve owes you quite a bit of work regarding publishing knock-off versions of Japanese cell phone character sets. This is an interesting entitlement to have, not because it is unique -- no, the OSS community includes lots and lots of people with it -- but because you've chosen to throw down the gauntlet over approximately the most trivial problem space ever addressed by an OSS project and it is one you don't even use. And for the sin of not making it easy enough to consume the free solution to that problem space (which is -- for bonus irony points -- because Steve actually was a conscientious OSS developer and went the extra mile to avoid infringing on the copyright law that OSS is vitally dependent on), you're wishing ill on him.
You can, should you choose, publish a competing emoji gem. It will be whole keystrokes away from Steve's. Should you achieve success with it, the Google gods will even look upon you with favor and put it one notch higher than the Internet.
Instructions for building and publishing gems are available on your local Internet. Godspeed.
Did you read Steve's justification for the limitation? "This other library is infringing copyright" isn't passing the buck.
> Perhaps the maintainer should burn out, and let someone take over the gem who'll commit to feature-completeness.
There is a handy "fork" button on Github. Of course, entitled bitching is a lot cheaper than maintaining a library, emitting a pull request or spending precious bytes on a modicum of courtesy.
It may be reasonable, but it's not correct. Unless there's a central authority assigning and approving namespaces for gems, then insisting that authoritative-sounding names actually be authoritative doesn't reflect reality. "Emoji" really doesn't mean anything other than "here is a unique string to differentiate this package from all of the others." Describing what it actually does, or doesn't do or contain, is what the readme is for.
I'm not arguing that namespaces should be arbitrary and essentially meaningless, just that for the most part they are.
The library author is a person who's taken the time to publish their work for free. If one finds issues with the library, the polite thing to do would be to first ask about it instead of complaining. There are likely good reasons for this (and lack of time is a very good reason). A simple "I find you aren't supporting these emojis. Is there a reason for that and can I do anything to help?" goes a long way.
I find this comment in poor taste. A burnout is not something I wish to anyone.
The difference is not between an incomplete gem and a complete gem, it's between an incomplete gem that's still being maintained, and an incomplete gem that's not being maintained.
What full, standard set? Is there an RFC that sets it out, possibly called Annoyingly Animated Smilies From Japan?